I was watching The Rachel Maddow Show tonight and the segment about Blago came on. I could not believe what I was seeing! The horror, the carnage of typography on my screen.

Here is what was shown:

Notice that they used a single quote when it should have been an apostrophe to indicate a contraction of Blagojevich, like so:

Apostrophes everywhere are pretty hopping mad and demand an apology from TRMS. In this era of high unemployment, the apostrophe union is demanding an explanation as to why a single quote was used when there was clearly a large pool of qualified, skilled apostrophes available for the job.

Maddow, we’re waiting. And we’re not going to accept a contracted apology.

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Radical conservatives failed to destroy and disband the NAACP this week like they did ACORN with Andrew Breitbart’s posting of a edited video featuring Shirley Sherrod. At the end of the week, it really didn’t matter that their primary objective was not met as the mainstream media handed them an even bigger victory; virtually no successful news from the White House. The only thing most Americans know about Barack Obama this week is how quick he was to fire Sherrod* and how thin-skinned his administration is about race. The Sherrod video turned out to be a huge distraction that sucked the oxygen out of the entire news cycle for the week.

On Wednesday, Obama signed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law. This bill was first introduced in December of 2009 in response to “too big to fail” and the criminal abuses of the banking and Wall Street systems. On Thursday, 2.5 million unemployed Americans breathed a sigh of relief as unemployment benefits were restored.

Did you know that? Most didn’t as the pollsters made their rounds, asking how effective Obama is as president. Again, media concluded that Obama is in trouble as his popularity slides even in the wake of successful legislation. Wonder why.

Conservatives have found their dead parakeet. All they need do when it looks like the President is about to have a success is float some outrageous video that baits race, which gets the left all worked up and the right mad as hell which only riles the legit media into a non-stop twenty-four hours of back-to-back coverage. It’s like a fixation on a shiny metal balloon.

Devious, underhanded, juvenile but a pretty smart strategy. It would have been brilliant if they didn’t just stumble into it.

NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, Reuters, AP. Just look away. It’s just a shiny balloon.

*I know that Barack Obama didn’t fire Sherrod, but how many of our 300million + Einsteins out there know it? Exactly.

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I was flipping through the morning news shows today and now that the BP Oil gusher is all capped off and nobody really cares about that anymore, there is more bandwidth to talk about jobs or the lack of jobs. Apparently media anchors are stunned that companies are hoarding cash and and not sharing with everyone by creating jobs.

They inevitably interview some know-nothing economics professor who parrots the US Chamber of Commerce position that it is the crushing weight of regulation and uncertainty that is making business hesitant to hire. Everyone keeps saying it over and over and over, so it must be true, right?

No.

Business creates jobs and hires for one of two reasons; to fulfill existing demand and to create new demand. In short, they need a visible, viable revenue stream and that stream comes from customers. A private-sector job is not a charity handout or a social program. It exists because it makes money for a company. Period.

But business is looking out on the horizon and not seeing any customers lining up to buy their goods and services. They are seeing no potential customers behind the ones that are not there. The customers that are looking to buy are bottom-feeders who demand a low price and high maintenance and then leave once they find a better price. Many businesses are saying “no” and just sticking the cash in the bank, squeezing their existing employees a little harder for increased productivity and waiting it out for real customers to come along.

Moreover, if government were to lift regulations and decrease taxes, business would still not hire without a viable revenue stream. They would just pocket the money and fatten up the bottom line. In addition, since they now need fewer employees to perform regulatory tasks, they would let them go, further increasing profits. But, they still would not hire until they see a viable revenue stream. I know because I am one of them.

Of course the Chamber is going to ask the government for less regulation and lower taxes. That is all the government can give them. What they really want to ask for is a crap-load of people to buy goods and services from their members, but that is silly and they know it. The government can’t (or shouldn’t) compel people to buy a certain level of goods and services just so business can hire more people. What the Chamber is doing is setting the government up as the “boogie-man” or a common enemy for their members as it takes the heat off their members inability or unwillingness to dive in and make investments on new good and services, on the very probable risk that they will lose the farm in the process. No business is going to do that, so they need a common enemy the average Joe can understand. The government becomes Dale Snitterman.

The Chamber can’t afford the population to turn it’s anger on its members. Americans already think most businesspeople are greedy, corrupt, manipulative, unfeeling, cold-hearted bastards who would sell their own grandmother for an extra dimes of profit or stock price increase.

We’re all being played again. The real solution is for us to stick our necks out and dig into the savings we don’t have because we’ve been cashing in on our home equity and credit cards, living paycheck to paycheck. But the smart people who didn’t use their house as a piggy bank are not going to stick their necks out to help those who did.

And we keep staring each other down. Business who won’t hire because they don’t see a revenue stream and consumers who can’t spend because they haven’t got a job.

It’s Dale Snitterman’s fault! Let’s get him, yells the Chamber. And media runs cheering in predictable mob-like fashion, flamed on by those who know better, relieved that the stupid populace is not throwing bricks through the windows, looting the stores, spilling casks of wine and highjacking trucks in desperate retaliation.

Business knows that it can’t sustain profitability based on cost-cutting forever. Eventually, the sales they are getting will decline as more people become unemployed and are unable to purchase goods and services. But, they also know that the cash-rich companies are more likely to survive a siege longer than their competitors and eventually, they either buy them up or allow the competition to crumble, gaining market share by default in the process.

Customers will come along eventually. It is a big game of chicken where time and nature will ultimately force consumers to buy stuff they can’t afford but need to sustain life. And the ball will begin rolling again. Business knows that. Economists know that. What they don’t know is how long that will take.

In the meantime we can either do something, anything; or blame Dale Snitterman.

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Today is Bastille Day. I realized this morning that I have a ton of short stories from my childhood just collecting dust. So, I thought I’d share one a year until I run out or die, whichever comes first. For those of you who know me, I am half French, descended from the mighty Pelletiers and Boutots. A brief search discovers that half of them stayed drunk long enough to wake up late on the wrong side of the river bank after the Treaty of Paris. Being French, they simply did not care all that much about a river between them. Still don’t.

2010 story: I speak French for the first time
When I was a pup of about ten years old, my grandmother — who was almost sixty years old — boarded an airplane for the very first time in her life in Bangor, Maine and flew to visit our litter of five halfway around the world in St. Paul, MN. My grandfather chickened out at the last minute and stayed home. It must have been terrifying for her, but she insisted on seeing her grandkids before she died.*

She had lived her entire life in the very small town of Fort Kent, Maine, just a skip across the St. John River. She spoke no English and we spoke no French. My parents were adamant about us assimilating.

To prepare us for our grandmother’s visit, my mom taught us only one phrase in French:
Je ne parle pas français

When my grand-mère spoke to us kids, we were supposed to say that. As pretty as the French language was, we ended up making it ugly by saying it like a sing-song-y rhyme that Sesame Street would be proud to own the rights to. It would have embarrassed even the French soccer team.

On the first day of the visit, my dad went to pick up his mother-in-law from the airport while we all waited anxiously at home practicing our “French.” When his car came back, this very short, very round, very stern-looking women in a flowery dress steps out, clasping her beige handbag in front of her.

She spoke. And my sisters froze up. And I piped up, “Je ne parle pas français.”

There was a short silence as this old woman welled up in tears, dropped her handbag and rushed toward me with her arms outstretched. She hugged me tight, her round, ample body enveloping me like a huge down pillow. When she finally let me go, she went and wet-kissed all us kids on the foreheads and cheeks, blurting out a string of non-stop French that I had only heard previously from my mom when one of us kids had done something that warranted a very large wooden spoon made of virgin-growth forest oak and a chase around the house.

I learned later that she was so happy that my mom had finally taught us some French and kept the tradition alive. Apparently the language thing was a big deal between mother and daughter. For the next ten days, I heard my mother speak nothing but French.

She seemed happier.

Happy Bastille Day. Drink too much, eat too well, sing too loud and hold a kiss too long.

*Never underestimate a stubborn Frenchwoman. They are all stubborn.

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There is a walkway path along the Stillwater River in Englewood that connects Grossnickel Park and that new lake along Wenger road. While we generally support walkways in parks, the stretch of walkway that passes underneath Interstate 70 is very, very scary and probably quite unsafe.

Here is a short video of us walking underneath it. Notice the crumbling cement and lack of any containment cage. One of these days, a truck is going to blow a tire and those rubber shreds and steel belts will kill a jogger or dogwalker. Just don’t want it to be me.

I know Englewood is doing a ton of improvements all over the place. Can you send a crew to weld a cage in place? Thanks. I know you have the money because you cashed my tax check.

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I am going out a ledge with this post, but there are some thought cloud trending happening in the news, in blogs and in our culture generally that looks like it is going to take hold of the way we view gender in the next several years. I need to get this off my chest and vow here that no matter how much our culture will be driven by women in the next generation, these things will never be true. I may lose my entire female readership over this, but that is just life. We all decide which pack we’re going to run with.

Men are dogs needing to be trained
Dogs are dogs. Men are human beings who just happen to be a different gender than women. Some of the blogs written by women that I have been reading for a while are becoming more bold at comparing the men in their lives to dogs needing to be trained. (I’m not going to list them here, but you know who you are.) Take a look at the picture of Charlie wearing a tie. If you can’t tell the difference between that and a man, you have got some serious issues. Comparing men to dogs is not fair to dogs so just stop it. It’s not funny and it’s really not clever.

If you are so eager to train a dog, get a dog. Quit confusing us with men.

My husband is my third child
I overhear this all the time from in real-life friends and on television shows, usually when women are frustrated at how little men pay attention to messes around the house, when they perceive they need to constantly remind their man about upcoming events or when they feel the need to constantly instruct him on how to do something.*

Children are your children. Your children are also your partner’s children. When you refer to him as a child, why are you shocked that he doesn’t see himself as an adult and a dad? Take a good look at yourself. Even children don’t need a mother 24/7, though it may well be you who needs to be a mom 24/7. Men already have a mom and it ain’t you. Quit acting like it should be.

My darling husband
Even if you are getting away with the first two, men know sarcastic passive aggression when they see it. They also know what DH means in tweets and texts. Just stop with this.

Marketers tell us that women are on the rise, that it is becoming a women’s world in the workplace and the marketplace in general. They proudly announce that as women become wealthier, more independent and more powerful, men are becoming obsolete. They point to the current recession as the boost that women needed to gain economic parity or dominance as men are disproportionately laid off and forced into “domestic roles.” They see gender as a zero-sum game, where in order for women to “win” they must crush men.

Some women view this as an opportunity to even the score, to declare this the era of the woman, to declare their independence from men. The proudly derail their men in bold mommyblogs and women’s conferences. And marketers fuel this rift by positioning their brands with women, further derailing emasculated men. A dream of brand respect bloggers like Caleb Gardner writes about won’t ever happen because brands are aligning almost entirely with women. Men who blog about daddydom are seen by brands as just doing it to keep busy.

The pendulum will shift back eventually where men will be men, but our culture does not have to be a wild pendulum swing from one extreme to the other. If you are a woman and you find yourself engaging in any of the three things above, stop for a moment and think about what this projects to the young puppies who are watching you. And, more importantly, to the men they interact with. Resentment is not gender-specific. Even though men may be growing quieter in the marketplace, it does not mean they are becoming passive.

Bark at me in the comments below. Fair warning; I’m too old and canine to have my mind changed easily. Plus, I’ve got a pretty good nose for culture wind shift. Bookmark this and come back in five years, see if I was right.

*Men really know how to do most of what you feel the need to bark step by step instructions on. The more you bark, the slower they go. You already know that, right?

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This weekend, millions of people across the United States will be firing up their grills and plunking down hamburger patties and grilling them. And those millions of people are all cooking cheeseburgers the wrong way. In my feeble attempt to save your taste buds from yet one more badly cooked cheeseburger, I offer you the definitive guide for cooking the perfect cheeseburger. Use this power wisely as any mis-application may result in you being invited to many BBQ parties only for your cooking skills.

Ingredients
As with every recipe, the perfect cheeseburger starts with the perfect ingredients. Luckily, the list is not long.
Hamburger, 80/20 ground chuck no leaner. This is no time to be thinking healthy.
Kaiser rolls, do not be tempted to go weird like Ciabatta rolls or anything like that. Kaiser rolls are the perfect hamburger bun, no substitutes.
Sharp cheddar cheese, the big brick kind. Do not get shredded or pre-sliced.
Lettuce, iceberg, fresh, cold. Keep cold. Again, keep cold! Also, like the rolls, do not substitute for fancy gourmet greens.

You will also need a flat griddle pan or a large frying pan. if you insist on using your grill, make sure you get a cast iron griddle you can place over the coals or burners.

Prep the ingredients
The cheese and hamburger should be chilled. First, cut the cheese into square slices about 1/4″ thick. You can cut thicker, but not thinner. Set them aside and allow to reach room temperature. You may find if you wet your knife between slices, it will cut easier. Make sure your knife is very, very sharp and that you take safety precautions. If you have a cheese slicer with an adjustable wire, use that instead as you need all ten fingers to eat the cheeseburger once done.

Make the hamburger patties by first wetting your hands and breaking off a piece of hamburger larger than an orange, but smaller than a grapefruit. The exact amount of meat is not important, only it’s size in relation to the bun. My favorite size bun is a 4 inch roll, so my uncooked patty will be about 5-5.5″ in diameter, at 1-1.5″ thick.

With the ball of meat in your hands, pack it down to a solid ball. Then, transfer it from palm to palm by smacking and turning it slighting as you transfer, making sure to hit the center of the ball with the meaty part of your palm. The patty will get larger and larger with each smack. Do this until the patty is about 1-1.5 inces larger than your roll. Place it on a cutting board and press a slight indentation in the center. The burger will shrink up and out and the indentation enables you to have a somewhat flat patty when fully cooked instead of a “ball-shaped” patty that is higher in the middle. Do this for every patty. Season the top slightly with salt and pepper, nothing else.

Then, allow the meat temperature to increase to room temperature. Do not rush to put cold meat on a hot pan as it will only result in all the juices running out quickly.

Fire up the griddle
Why a griddle? To remain juicy and tasty, ground meats should cook in their own fat. If you are using a grill, the fat will drip away of the meat, leaving a lifeless, dry, tasteless burger behind. Rule of thumb: solid meat like steak, seafood, chops are grilled; ground meats are fried.

Fire up the griddle over a medium heat and allow to come up to temperature. Place the hamburger patty seasoned side down and immediately sprinkle a small amount of salt and pepper on top. Allow a crust to form, about five minutes. Turn over and crust the other side. DO NOT PRESS DOWN ON THE BURGER PATTTY AT ANY TIME DURING THE COOKING PROCESS!!! Please be kind to your meat. Never poke a steak, never press a burger. Give each side about five minutes of cooking time and then gently turn. Keep cooking and turning until the burger reaches your desired doneness. For reference, the burgers used here cooked for 20 minutes on medium to low heat, turned gently every five minutes.

Make sure the burgers are cooking in their own fat. If your griddle is not level or you see the grease run off to the sides, keep turning the griddle or pushing the grease back. But be careful, hamburger grease is very flammable.

While the meat is cooking, cut leaves of lettuce from the head by making small incisions at the stalk and gently peeling back the leaf. Remove the bulk of the stalk within the leaf and return it to the refrigerator. The lettuce leaf must be crispy, cold and flat for the final assembly.

Melting the cheese, toasting the rolls
The final steps require precise timing. if there are any noisy distractions in the kitchen, shoo her out now. Turn on the broiler. I use a small toaster oven, but if you are hosting a party, you may want to turn to your oven. Slice the rolls and have ready to toast.

Place a slice of cheese on each burger and place under the broiler. WATCH THEM LIKE A HAWK. You want to see the cheese sweat slightly and the corners start to droop. Remove the burgers and set aside to rest.

Immediately place your buns sliced side up to toast. The cheese will continue to melt slowly and the burgers will rest, making sure the juices will not run out when you bit into them. Once your rolls are toasted, everything is ready.

Some cheeseburger people say to use shredded cheese or melt the cheese under a steam cap until it is fully melted and gooey. I say they are wrong. When cheese is fully melted, it separates slightly become sticky, tasteless and a little bitter. When it is slightly warmed, it retains it’s taste and texture. Really. I’m right.

Assemble the cheeseburger
Place the heel of the bun on the plate, slide the hamburger patty with slightly melted cheese onto it, place a cold lettuce leaf on top, place the top bun on top of that and serve. The time from assembly to serving to that first bite should be no more than .00001 seconds.

If you have done this correctly, you will bite into a cheeseburger that has a juicy, flavorful beef taste, with a slight crunch and a full-bodied cheese flavor that is slightly al dente.

Variations
No. No, really I advise no variations on this. I don’t care if you like ketchup, mustard, pickles, mayonnaise or other condiments, they are simply not allowed on the perfect cheeseburger. They only mask the taste.

Ok, there is one exception, but only one. Swiss cheese and mushrooms. Prepare the cheese as you did for the cheddar; cut cold and thick and allow to warm to room temperature. Prepare the mushrooms by sautéing in a small frying pan with butter, not margarine. Set aside and keep warm until the cheese warming phase, where you can place a layer of mushrooms between the hamburger patty and cheese slice immediately before broiling.

I may have lied. There is another variation; blue burger. But — and this is one huge but — only use quality blue cheese slices. Do not attempt to cheat with blue cheese dressing. Since blue cheese is hard to slice and keep in tact at room temperature, you can pile it on either crumbled or in slivers. Be bold; blue cheese deserves no less.

There you have the perfect cheeseburger recipe. Now, go forth and rid thy neighbors of crappy, dry, tasteless, over-grilled, mashed-down burgers this Fourth of July. George Washington would want you too.

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While listening to John Boehner’s interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on his description of the Tea Party protests, the following occurs to me. Even if not entirely true, it is the perception that is most prevalent.

The RIGHT shows up with guns and signs, backed by the Second Amendment and attempts to force others to their will.

The LEFT shows up with pens and blogs, backed by the First Amendment and attempts to convince others of their position.

Guns and force win in the short term. Thought and conversation is tenacious.

Thoughts?

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Take a good look at the map below. It is a county-by-county accounting of the 2008 presidential election. The red counties are Republicans; the blue are Democrats. The map is widely available to anyone on the Internet and if you want to dig deeper into the numbers, you can visit the board of elections website for any county. Fascinating stuff really.

The map was recently used by Chip Wood on the ultra-Conservative web site PersonalLiberty.com as a way to explain that the Democrats really did not win the election by land mass or by population and that the United States of America is being governed by a minority voice. Fair enough.

Here is what is really going on. Rush Limbaugh uses this technique, so does Glenn Beck. So do many other Conservative bloggers and commentators.

They first start out by presenting a map or chart or even a single fact that can’t be disputed. You can look up the election results by county and you would see that Wood is 100% accurate. And then they slide in another fact that can’t be disputed like a calculation of county by land mass per each side. Here is where this all gets a bit fuzzy, but since these are still verifiable facts, you don’t see the slight transition of “truth” happening. To make sure their map or chart sticks, they use an exact number that is truthful, but misleading. In this case, Wood uses population to cement the fact that 143 million people were cheated out of their rightful place by 127 million people. Here is the little, itty, bitty flaw in that last statement.

While it may be true that 143 million people live in the red counties (I didn’t look it up, but I could easily verify it) it assumes by inference that all of those people living there were eligible or chose to vote and if they did, they would vote red. The assertion by inference was that 100% of each red county voted red and 100% of each blue county voted blue. That is not the case. It could have been 51% red and 49% blue, which means it was a red county. But the vote only counts people who actually got out and voted. Had 100% of the people voted, chances are good that the vote still would have been split about the same. But, there is really no way to tell.

What we probably should count in square acreage is not the actual acreage the county claims, but the amount of ground underneath each voter’s feet that a vote claimed. But then, counties with voters who have larger than average feet would throw off the numbers. I digress.

But the really good commentators who use this method know they are getting a nod from their audience at this point because they have used facts that are indisputable and a couple that stretched a conclusion based on the indisputable fact. Emboldened by their ability to mesmerize their audience, they now are free to assert their own assumptions. In Wood’s case, he asserts that the “overwhelming majority of voters in the red areas pay more into government than they receive; while … The majority of people [in blue areas] receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes.” He goes further by saying that 45 percent of adults pay no income tax, inferring it is those blue area deadbeats who are not paying their fair share.

Wait a minute. How does he know that? There is no data provided in his article that allows his to make such a sweeping generalization. Besides, taking government comes in many forms. I offer this as an example. Yet few would argue that police and firefighting are government that is being doled out. But it is.

Let’s take a look at another example, and in full disclosure, I admit I did not do the research on what I am about to posit; I only offer it to get you thinking about alternative ways data can be presented and interpreted. If anyone wants to do the research, please have at it!

Let’s overlay a map of Walmart’s expansion on our political map, not Walmart locations as they are now, but as they expanded from Bentonville, AR. What we likely to see is an expansion into red areas on the political map. With each store location, Walmart negotiated tax incentives from the local governments in exchange for promises of jobs. In return, the citizens were promised lower prices for their goods and services. Explain to me how this is not deriving a government benefit? It may be convoluted and the check certainly does not arrive in the mail, written on a US Treasury account, but it is a benefit of government taxation nonetheless. And one of the worse kind; negotiated by a corporation whose primary interest is in making as much profit as possible at the expense of the government and the community.

Let’s look at another example. Few farmers are being paid to not plant. That once may have been the case, but it is really not true any more. What is more likely is huge expanse of farmland has been bought up by companies who mechanize farming and food production. Many of these companies take government subsidizes to plant corn for Ethanol production or corn syrup that enables us to keep food production costs and prices low. Without subsidies, farming companies would most likely sell the food to the highest bidder, many times this might even be a foreign nation. Subsidies to American farmers ensures the food will be used here first. Again these subsidies are not written out to individuals from the US Treasury as personal checks so it is easy for them to believe they are not getting any benefit for their tax dollars.

Or I could be making all this up as I go. Does it really matter? You’d believe anything cause I have a map.

By now, the commentator has wrapped himself in the flag and the duties, rights and responsibility of patriotism and inferring that anyone who doesn’t agree with his set of “facts” is a traitor. Having been grifted of their sense of logical argument faster than Addie Loggins passed twenty dollar bills in Paper Moon, the masses all nod in agreement. Having established credibility with the audience, the commentator continues making more and more outlandish claims, pointing to his established arguments just proved moments ago as proof.

Stay critical of anything you are told; left, right or center. Verify your own facts and make sure you draw conclusions from the long view, not just from a snapshot of history such an election map.

You are now free to pummel me with unsubstantiated facts, your grossly warped opinion or here-say you heard over the back yard fence from Aunty Mabel. Fair warning though, if you have not seen Paper Moon and are unfamiliar with the reference, you are disqualified as being too young to have a long enough view of history to be taken seriously.

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Yesterday, the GOP-filibustered Senate quit trying to extend the jobless benefits for 1.3 million Americans who have been out of work for two years. At the end of the week, these unemployed workers will not only be unpaid, but they will have entered into a state of extreme desperation. I’ve seen my neighbors desperate. Most of them own guns. Cutting them off abruptly is not a smart thing to do.

In the past two decades, major corporations have moved or downsized; US Air, DHL, Emery, Mead, Huffy, Standard Register, NCR and GM. Many others have downsized dramatically. All of these companies that moved away were major employers for Dayton, Ohio. All of them are now gone, leaving behind former employees who can’t afford to sell their homes because there is nobody out there willing to buy them. These are not the leeches the Republicans would have you believe are milking the unemployment system. These are hard-working people who have paid handsomely into the Federal and State unemployment INSURANCE program in the event they may have to draw from it should they find themselves out of work through no fault of their own.

The employers that have moved in all pay slightly more than minimum wage, but not much; Walmart, Payless and Caterpillar (coming soon.)

The average weekly unemployment benefit for someone out of work is a few hundred dollars. If the employee is paying for COBRA insurance, the cost of premiums must also come out of that meager amount. If they go to work at the local Walmart of Home Depot, they lose their benefits but more importantly, their ability to look for work. But that matters little; Walmart and Home Depot are not hiring.

In contrast, each US Senator who voted to cut off benefits to the long-term unemployed drew $3,346.15 last week. They will draw the same amount next week. And the week after. Their health insurance is paid for and they don’t risk being laid off when they show up for work tomorrow due to right-sizing or economic downturn.

Forty-one of them got paid for doing nothing other than showing up to vote “No.”

I can understand how easy it can be to draw the conclusion that the unemployment “safety net” is turning into a “hammock” when you don’t have to worry about being fired at will tomorrow. What I don’t understand is the failure of US Senators to understand that it is only because of tax dollars these “deadbeats” paid into a system that they are able to draw a salary that continues to adjust upwards to the cost of living, but never downwards based on the state of the economy.

Most of my neighbors would rather be working than hanging out and taking unemployment. They are unemployed and only unemployable because there are no jobs to be had. And the unemployment insurance is not a handout or a free entitlement like the GOP would have you believe; it has been paid into by the very people who need it but hoped they never would.

Cutting them off and then blaming them for their own unemployment can’t be a good thing, especially when forty-one Senators all got paid last week for doing what amounts to what they accuse the unemployed of doing; nothing.

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A challenge to define “successful design” was lobbed by @Modenus to several of us rather cantankerous voices in response to her post on “bad design.” Not ones to back away from a challenge, we all agreed to write a blog post on each of our sites defining successful design. Mine is here; please read the others in the challenge; Paul Anatar, Veronika Miller and Richard Holschuh.

My first reaction to successful design was; “is there any other kind?” Later that day while mowing my lawn, the linkage for the self-propulsion on my lawn mower fell apart and the answer was clearly, yes. There is a lot of lazy design out there, some of it staring back at me in pieces on my mower deck.

After thinking about design through several passes of my lawn over a couple weeks, all the while staring nervously at the repaired linkage on my lawn mower, I’ve realized two maxims that have driven my design work. There are probably more, but I don’t have the patience to write more and I may have already bored you insufferably.

– Successful design applies the Dreyer Principle (my words)
– Someone has to pay for the printing

The Dreyer Principle
Back when I was young and thought I knew everything, I stumbled upon a study of Ingmar Bergman which quickly led me to Carl Dreyer. Carl Dreyer was a Danish film director from the 1920s through the 60s. As most Danes are, he was a stubborn man whose view of the world was the only one that was true. I suppose most people who have vision and rise to greatness in any field are as stubborn. Or perhaps it is mostly a Danish* trait. The story about Carl Dreyer goes as such:

Dreyer was making a movie and it included a set of a kitchen. His producers were pressuring him to shoot the scene with a modern kitchen. So, he went and got a housewife and told her ‘money was no object, just make this space the best kitchen she could dream up.’ And she did, putting in every modern convenience of a late 1920s kitchen. Then Dreyer sat her in a chair in front of the kitchen she had created and started removing items, one at a time, with the instruction that she tell him the exact point the set was no longer a kitchen. He had removed more than 90% of the set when she stopped him.

I don’t know if the story is true or not, but judging from his films, the commercial exuberance of the 1920s and my own experience with clients who wish to load up simplicity with feature bloat, I’d have to say that at least the spirit of the story is true. He probably had thousands of arguments about design throughout his career. Judging from his body of work, I’d guess he won them all.

Successful design simplifies the experience to its basic function. The easiest design solution is to bolt a feature or an attachment to the side of something, but then the essence of what that thing is gets interrupted, jarred and distracted. If the feature is necessary, it is far better to continue to work a design and integrate the feature as part of the piece rather than clutter the set. Deciding the minimum of what is necessary to define a thing is design; bolting things together is just lazy mechanics. For example, iPod vs Zune; iPhone vs Blackberry; this finished, edited post vs the 10,000 word first draft you will never read.

Paying for the Printing
Back when I worked at a newspaper, I was given the fresh artists to break in. Since the paper didn’t pay top dollar, it usually didn’t get artists with a lot of experience. Sometimes, they were fresh out of design school.

Artists are not taught print shop skills, so they have no idea how much pre-press work goes into making their designs work well enough to print on a press at 53lpi, 100dpi with a dot gain of 30% or better. They have no idea how to manage their chokes and spreads, that they can’t simply mix RGB images with CMYK and that a C100M100Y100K100 may look like a really rich black on a 300lpi coffee table book, but it will rip newsprint to shreds on the blanket. In short, nobody taught them their designs must be printable. And that somebody pays for that.

So, their first day was always in the print shop, loading paper trays, understanding how to adjust ink on the rollers and learning little tricks like wrapping a bit of card stock under the plate to force a spread on a key color to mask register when the designer did not account for dot gain. At the end of the day, their back hurt, their fingers bled and they sweat a lot. But they started to understand how to design working backwards. They started to understand how bad design decisions early on made what they perceived to be solid work unwieldy or worse, unusable.

Great designers work backwards from the physical constraints they work against. That is not to say they are limited by them; far from it. But they understand how they work and are able to extend them. Years ago, a designer was constrained by what a physical press, die cutter and binder could do. Now, a web designer has a lot more freedom from physical constraints, but is challenged by the explosion of options the user demands. But in each case, the designer knows the end product well and works from the user forward.

For a bathroom fixture designer, this means you have to be able to clean the sink. If a sink looks nice, but is not maintainable, the design fails. If a couch looks cool but can’t weather a wet dog, the design fails. If a house built on the side of a cliff slides off because the architect did not understand soil composition, the design fails. Nobody gets points for great blueprints. Successful design gets produced; art stays on paper.

If you’ve read this far, you deserve to know what broken lawn mower linkage has to do with design. The linkage solved the problem of moving the speed engagement gear on a flywheel to adjust the speed at which the mower moved. When the linkage broke, the mower went into hyper-fast mode when the default could easily have been slowest. Hyper-fast rendered the mower almost uncontrollable. In addition, the connecting bolt pushed up through the attachment arm and bolted at the top with a nut that vibrated free when it could have easily been positioned downward so gravity would assist it in staying in place should the nut vibrate free. The designer solved the problem, but clearly was never a victim of broken linkage (paying for the printing) nor did s/he choose the simpler solution, i.e., gravity (Dreyer Principle)

Does any of this make sense? Comment if you must.

*My experience with the several dozen Danes I know tend to put all of them in the upper extreme on the stubborn scale. Your experience may vary, but probably won’t by much; they are very proud of their ability to be right about everything.

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I watched MSNBC Chris Matthews’ The Rise of the New Right yesterday. I learned almost nothing new about the Tea Party and the conservative movement, but Alex Jones’ quote, “We’re in deep tyranny. Deep, deep, deep…” keeps ringing through my head. This man is afraid and wants to make everyone else around him fearful. I guess fear sells as his website is chock full of ads. (By the way, everyone advocates for hoarding gold, water, guns and ammo, but nobody thinks a loyal dog would help. Except Hollywood. If this country collapses, I’m sticking with my pack.)

Then I got to thinking about who the real tyrants are in America. Alex Jones, his network and FOX News came to mind right away, but so did a lot of others. I’ve prepared a very short list below to get you thinking about how much non-government tyranny is wielded over us with little oversight and almost no recourse.

FICO Scores and Credit Agencies (TransUnion, Experian and Equifax)
Every American has now been reduced to a non-disputable, three-digit FICO Score between 450-850. A FICO Score is determined by a semi-secret algorithm that is held by a private corporation. Your FICO Score determines if you will get a loan, a job, insurance and an apartment. It determines where you can live, where you can work and how much in interest you will pay on a loan if you are deemed worthy enough to get one. It even determines whether or not you can serve your country in the military and to what capacity. If your FICO Score is too low, you can be denied a security clearance.

If you become unemployed and begin shopping at WalMart to save money, your FICO Score will be adjusted accordingly, thereby affecting your credit limits. If your identity is stolen, your FICO Score will be decimated with little recourse. If the credit bureaus make a mistake reporting your payment history, they do so with impunity and can erode your FICO Score with one typo on an account number, name, amount, etc.

Personal Debt
Nothing in this country paralyzes economic or personal mobility more than personal debt. Yet we embrace it every time we buy something on credit, lease something we can’t possibly afford, charge a new gadget that we have to have or buy something on late night TV for three easy payments. The credit card has become the new handcuff. Try renting a car without a credit card or staying in a hotel by paying cash. Try buying an airline ticket without a credit card (well, now anyway, not before the NYC car bomb thing.)

Homeowner’s Associations
If you think you own your own home, go ahead and try painting it lime green with chocolate shutters. Try putting up a large flagpole and fly an eight-foot American flag in the front yard. Try digging up your back yard and planting a vegetable garden. Try building a chicken coop and raise chickens. Try drilling for oil on your property. Try putting up a radio tower. Try putting up a wind turbine generator. Try doing something as Earth-friendly as hanging your laundry out to dry. You will find out very quickly how much power your homeowner’s association has and how forcefully they will wield it.

Health Insurance Companies
Regardless of how you feel about your health insurance, they are the only “death panels” in this country. Doctors want you to live as long as possible. So do hospitals, health care clinics and drug companies. Dead people don’t generate recurring income. The only ones that want you to die quickly when you are sick are health insurance companies. It is in their best interest to rush you to your end. Healthy people pay premiums; sick people rack up expenses. You do the math.

Parent Associations at Schools
If you think your child will succeed by getting good grades or get a place on the team by working hard and honing skills, you have never had an interaction with a parent association. Their members consist of self-appointed despots who have gone to the school and their parents went there and their parents went there. Getting “in” a parent association requires more humiliation than the worse sorority/fraternity hazing you can imagine. Staying in requires all the vicious deft of a hockey mom and the morals of a soccer mom.

These are just a few “unelected, non-government” groups that wield tremendous power over our day-to-day lives and have far more influence on where we can go, what we can do and to whom we can speak. They control what opportunities our children have, what homes we can buy, where we can live and what jobs we can have.

I could think of a few more like churches, energy corporations, your own employer, etc but I’ll leave those to you and the comments below.

Ironically enough, it is government that is most likely to protect us from these unelected tyrants. Or at least try to. Or want to try to. Or say they want to try to.

Our “free society” is at once our greatest asset and our greatest enemy. It enables us to plunder and pillage resources that belong to all of us for the purpose of personal enrichment. It is the hoarding of power with a select few — be that elected senators like McCarthy or fear-mongering activists like Jones — that is the real tyranny.

We should be vigilant and suspicious of both.

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Today is Nate Berkus Day, declared by Joy and Janet @moggitgirls. For those who don’t know, Nate is (was) Oprah’s designer and is now going to host his own design show on NBC in September.

Whoopie. Another celebrity interior designer with his own show.

But wait! This guy has dogs! This is an interesting twist for us out here in design-lemming-land.

What if every design episode starts off with the question, “Can this design survive a wet dog?” During the course of the episode — as the design is coming together — Nate does a variation on the design for people with dogs and people without. “If you don’t have a dog, that white Italian leather sofa is a good idea; if you do, why not consider this equally attractive but not as expensive pleather look a-like that is easier to clean?” that sort of thing.

Real people have dogs. And dogs play havoc with design. Unless you start the design with the ability to keep it looking clean and nice and work backwards. (inspired by this post by Paul Anatar. If you can’t clean it, don’t install it.)

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When the TSA started holding airports and airlines hostage almost nine years ago, my tolerance for driving distance increased from two hours to ten. With only two reliable flights out of DAY to anywhere — the first one and the last — what used to be a same-day trip has now expanded to a minimum of three days. So, I’ve gotten to driving pretty much anywhere I need to go.

All those trips need to be powered by gasoline. When I am on the road, I don’t just pull over to any gas station I find open and willing to sell me gas. I pull into a gas station that is clean, the gas is of reliable quality, the credit card machines work and that have name-brand recognition. Being two to ten hours away from home with a tank of bad gas is just not my idea of a fun time.

And most of the time that meant pulling into a BP station. BP had made it’s retail franchises like the McDonald’s of the gas world. And because of that, they got my business. Because of that, the local owners got my business for more than just gas. The road has it’s own demands. We’ll come back to this later.

As this Gulf Oil Gush produces more bad will toward BP, there is a movement afoot to stem the rising tide of boycotts against BP stations. The argument goes as such:

The BP station is independently owned by one of your neighbors and by boycotting, you are hurting your own local economy. These are the people who support your local baseball team, are members of your PTA and are just trying to make a living in this otherwise horrible economy. Moreover, it is not BP that caused the greater problem as we ALL are at fault with our demand for low priced gasoline and cheap goods and services. Shouldn’t we all be sharing the blame here?

As a small business owner who hated +$4/gal gas a few years back, the argument almost worked on me. These are powerful statements and are, for the most part, true.* I wouldn’t want my customers turning on me because of something a corporation did for which I have no control.

Let’s look a little more closely at a couple of “truths” about boycotting BP stations.

We are all at fault for demanding low prices on everything the petroleum industry produces
Companies make products to sell and marketing companies create ways to make consumer want them. And more and more and more. Price is just one tool in their arsenal. Since no company stays in business for very long selling a product that costs more than it sells for, they find ways to subsidize production costs or cut quality. The consumer does not set the price;** the marketer sets the price. Low-priced gasoline and the subsequent purchase of our SUVs and excessive driving habits, etc are all by-products of marketers wanting to sell more crap. We’re just dumb saps falling for the consumer lifestyle they bludgeon us with.

If we actually had to pay for the real cost of gas, we would. If we had to pay the real cost of food, we would. We would buy fewer cars and they would be smaller and more fuel-efficient. We would buy less food and waste less. (How many people don’t eat the entire $12.00 hot dog at a ball park?) Without cheap gas, the auto industry would have put more money into developing fuel-efficient technology instead of flashy car ads for TV. But it was easier to convince ordinary people who did not have the money to buy a car to finance it and lobby tax subsidies from governements to keep fuel costs low.

It is clever trying to make us all accept communal blame for the Gulf Oil Gush, but it simply isn’t true. The oil industry created low prices to sell more stuff to make more profit. The American consumer simply accepted the lower prices because there was no alternative. And we became addicted because that is what human beings do. Had the oil prices remained high to their true cost, we would have also adapted because, surprisingly, that is what human beings do.

The BP station owner is not at fault. Don’t hate on him; he is one of us.
Again, this is yet another marketing ploy to keep us from boycotting or worse, descending upon the station with pitch forks and torches is a fit of oil rage. The BP owner IS at fault for accepting the franchise, co-op ad dollars, brand good-will and increased sales due to product trust (see my road trip stuff above.) If this were not true, then having a BP sign and branding on the pumps would not matter. We would feel perfectly happy to buy our gasoline from Joe’s Gas and Pump Stump. But we don’t trust Joe. Joe probably waters down his gas to make more profit. BP doesn’t; they are reputable. In short, the station owner benefitted from BP’s marketing. They just happened to have bet on a horse that tripped and broke its leg. Or maybe they didn’t really have a choice as BP was going to put them out of business if they didn’t sign. But nobody forced them to stay in the retail gas business. We hope.

For those of us old enough to remember the Vietnam War, we understand how socially dangerous it was to ask, “Do you support the war effort?” So does our government; so much so that when the Gulf War came around in 1991, it was not even a question. The position went from “support the war” to “support our troops.” Regardless of whether you thought the Gulf War was just or not, you couldn’t possibly be against the troops. It was a very clever marketing message that was a no-win to disagree with. And the same message was used at 9/11 with the endless stream of “God Bless America” performances and unchecked anti-freedoms legislation by the US Congress.

And now the same tactics are being employed by our governments, media and BP to keep the citizens from becoming angry. We can’t show up to protest in front of an oil rig, but there is a BP station in every neighborhood. The problem was simple to define; how will governments and BP prevent the citizens from taking out their anger at the pump? We’ll make the station owner one of them and make them feel stupid and trite by convincing them they are all at fault and they don’t understand modern economics.

And for the most part, it is working. If someone starts a “Boycott BP” group on Facebook, they are immediately ridiculed for not understanding how business works, that the owner is really not part of BP, that they are only hurting their local economy, that they are part of the bigger problem so they are being a hypocrite! Nobody likes to be sneered at in public by the media and influential voices for being “unsophisticated.” (As an example, look what they are doing to Alvin Greene.)

You may jeer at me and call me unsophisticated, but I am still not going to buy gas from my local BP station. I’m not going to be joining any “Boycott BP” groups on Facebook either because that is just lazy protesting. But I am going to continue to reduce my footprint and support local business people who know my name and appreciate every sale. Even when I know I could buy it for less somewhere else.

And hope for the day when I no longer need to buy gasoline from BP or anyone else.

*Except for that supporting the local baseball team. My local BP station always turned down my request for a sponsorship, saying they would get business anyway from teams traveling in. I’m not bitter. Much.

**Next time you are in a grocery store, try asking to pay MORE than the listed price for that loaf of bread. There is no way to do it. Consumer don’t demand low price. We are convinced by smart marketers and media that high prices is what keep us from buying stuff. It’s an easy argument; marketers and media always take the easy road.

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It rained pretty hard this morning but there was only one puddle left when we went walking later in the afternoon. Guess who found that one puddle.

Yup, Sallie.

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Fran and Margaret by Sally Phillips Buffington. Orange Beach, Alabama when the sands were white and pure.

Down two blocks and over one, there is a house that has two special-needs kids. Every morning at 6:27am, a over-sized school bus with tinted windows roars up to their door and whisks them away. The driver must always be running late because he (or she I can’t see into the bus) punches the gas and leaves behind a huge cloud of exhaust that reeks of burned diesel fuel.

This morning, we were slightly late on the walk and we missed the bus, but not the fuel smell. As we rounded the corner, the lingering odor of the exhaust caught up in my lungs, throwing my otherwise peaceful walk in the cool, early-morning air into a fit of irritation.

After 9/11, many people here in Dayton expressed their angry and fear about the terrorist attacks. Many had never been to New York City and seen the twin towers up close so the connection to them wasn’t strong. They would mouth the words of patriotism and revenge as if written on a cue card. But there was no deep sadness in their voices, no tremble of loss in their souls. It wasn’t empathetic. Where there was no experience, you saw fear, anger and worry as a veneer in their eyes.

But for the few of us here who had experienced the towers first-hand, the feelings ran deeper than anger and fear. Where there was experience, you saw deep sadness that could only come from empathy; from knowing that none of us will ever again be able to stand small under the towering glass and steel that seemed to lift endlessly into the sky.

I read an email from a friend last night about the oil from the BP disaster coming ashore on the white sand beaches of the Florida panhandle. Her description of her backyard was about as beautiful as I had ever read and as gorgeous as I remember the last time I was there more than ten years ago. Almost immediately, the sights, sensations and smells of a Florida beach came rushing over me. And I felt overwhelmed with a sense of loss.

My head was still on the Florida beach when I stepped out to walk this morning. As I turned the corner at the end of the street two blocks down and one block over, the putrid, vile smell of exhaust jolted me out off the beach and into the reality of what Florida is about to become.

And I felt very sad, very helpless and very violated.

Forty-three days of apathy later, I understood why most of us aren’t connecting our lives to the true horrors of what is happening in the Gulf, even as we are assaulted with it 24/7 by cable news as we were with 9/11.

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Sallie chewed up a blue pen last night and got herself inked.

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During the week of the start of Desert Storm, I was attending a week-long “Train the Trainer” workshop in Oldtown, Alexandria just down the road from Washington DC. There was a small sub group of us that sorta bonded together a bit and we spent the few evenings we had eating dinner together, talking. I remember only three people from this group; a slightly older, bubbly talkative woman who worked at Mead, (also in Dayton at the time) a much older gentleman who would never have a definite opinion about anything and a Jamaican man about my age who hardly said anything, but had that really calm, relaxing energy. (a stereotype, I know but it was true.) I don’t remember any of their names.

On that Wednesday, Jan 16, we decided to venture out toward the river to catch some dinner. We found this upscale bar/restaurant that supposedly served pretty good hamburgers so we walked the ten or so blocks, got a table right next to the ragtime piano player and ordered. Shortly after our food came, the television switched over to President Bush (41) and the place came to a dead hush. Moments later, we were told our nation was at war.

And that moment of silence seemed to last forever. Even longer than it took to watch the North tower fall on 9/11.

The piano player started playing again, somewhat tentatively at first and the room eventually composed with that sort of fake “life goes on” feeling that you screw onto the front of your face to convince everyone around you that everything is going to be fine. We ate in near silence, none of us really finishing our sandwiches.

We went out into the cool Virginia air for a walk and found ourselves leaning over a railing, overlooking a marina that looked like a perfect postcard. The Jamaican sighed slightly and said softly to himself, “I could commit suicide right here.”

I could feel the woman from Mead back away slightly as she glanced at me, her eyes saying “this man is crazy.”

I didn’t react, but I knew exactly what he meant. I was feeling the same thing, but perhaps not the exact words. But after hearing him, I don’t think there could have been any words more fitting.

Over the past nineteen years, I have been fortunate to have experienced a half dozen or so memorable scenes like that marina. And each time his voice played in my head, softly whispering, “I could commit suicide right here.”

I would never have shared that voice out loud with anyone as he did. They would have misunderstood. The few people I shared this story with did misunderstand, so I quit telling it.

With the exception of that one Jamaican, I thought there was nobody else could see scenery like this. Until I read Don Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. And it seemed urgent that I not only tell this story, but I write it down.

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I made a short little bumper sticker on Zazzle.com based on a tweet idea I just flung out there. If you want the sticker, buy it or make your own with your own twitter account. Either way is cool with me!

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I was reading Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years on my iPad using Kindle when I flipped the page and saw a passage underlined with a dashed line.

“Hmmm, what’s this,” I asked myself. I never highlight passages in a book unless I am working on a paper and I forgot my post-it notes. (I have a literary theory that is loosely based on Stanley Fish‘s resurrection of affective criticism, but I won’t go into that right now… maybe later; Serious lit types hate anything affective. Phhttt!)

So I clicked on it and a window pops up telling me that 151 other people highlighted the passage. I was immediately outraged. How dare Amazon have the audacity to reach into MY book that I had paid for and think it ok to mark up my book nilly-willy with other people’s thoughts. How dare they screw up my reading and discovery experience. I went through all sorts of levels of rage and mistrust and eventually settled on this behavior being only one in a larger context of online behaviors. We don’t read anymore to discover ideas, to think critically through issues or to seek an understanding of complex ideas but to discover nuggets of wisdom, as known as the “quotable passage” or the “sound bite.”

Once we’ve found that nugget, we dust it off and highlight it so that others who come after us need only look for our dashed lines and not have to slog through the first 200 or so pages of babble prior to it that was just the writer’s excuse to get a book published and the publisher’s justification to charge us an insane amount of money. “Tear down these walls surrounding knowledge and wisdom,” goes the rallying cry of the consuming public. “Information needs to be free!”

We’re impatient with knowing things, which gave rise to CNN Headline News, Top 10 lists of anything, just the facts, ma’am, the bulleted Powerpoint presentation, give me the bottom line and dare I say, Twitter. We scour for and happily retweet banal, stupid crap from well-known twitterati that sounds anything like pithy, wise quotes. We draw conclusions about news based on headlines in newspapers, articles and blogs. We happily “report” out “facts” from CNN that were presented in a 10-30 second segment with the depth of understanding as an expert scientist. We don’t allow our leaders to fully articulate a complex position, instead only scan for that quotable sound bite that will play well over and over on the news, late-night tv and at cocktail parties.

We highlight passages in books or look for the highlighted passages from otherss to display our wisdom like a proud peacock without fully understanding how and why we arrived where we did.

We’re becoming a culture of “idiots, full of sound and fury” who know everything but understands nothing. This is why the Internet is making us dumber. We shortchange the journey in search of the destination. Everything now must be a destination or it is a waste of time and effort. Even this blog article you are reading right now, many of you are trying to sum it all up to a 140 character retweet. Can’t be done because it shouldn’t be done. (The title was intentionally long to keep folks from blindly retweeting. If you must retweet, re-write the title in your own words about what you took away. Or not, I don’t care.)

Discuss — if you can. (Warning: Only the people who actually read the entire book without highlighting the punctuating “moral lessons” will understand how ironic it is to highlight anything in this book.)

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@simonegrant

I’m a fan of Simone Grant‘s blog Sex, Lies and Dating in the City (don’t judge, just read her blog, ok?) Yesterday, I was watching FOX because that is where the Simpsons are and I saw the promo for Glee. And for a fraction of a second, they showed a cut to a pair of red dance shoes and my brain immediately zipped back to Simone’s blog. All her posts that I had read recently flashed through my brain like someone fanning a deck of cards.

And I am going to watch that episode of Glee just because my brain is now curious about how big a part the red shoes have in the production. I have to know.

BTW, here is the promo. Scan to 00:11 in case you don’t want to watch the entire thing, but it is only :30 seconds long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yThxfPQN6FY

Now here is the really complicated part. Not only is this episode of Glee somehow connected in my brain to a blog I read, but that blog is now connected to Lady GaGa’s Bad Romance which I bought for $1.29 off iTunes because I couldn’t get the song out of my head. If you can’t beat ‘em, play the song really loud on the stereo. (again, don’t judge me! Sorry Simone, I hope you are a Lady GaGa fan or at least don’t hate her.)

And after thinking about random connections for a minute or so, a blog post by Shannon Paul was perfectly relevant and fitting. In the post, there is a link to a study by GroupM about the interplay happening here. (I think, unless I read it all wrong, which is possible.)

I will watch Glee tomorrow; I bought an iTunes track for $1.29 and I plugged two really cool blogs. And I am convinced all of this random connection of stuff happens millions — perhaps even billions — of times per day without any marketing people having a conscious hand in any of it. Simone could probably increase viewership a bit by tweeting out to her followers they watch Glee and why. Shannon could do the same. I suppose if ever presented with the evidence of these connections, many marketing-types would dismiss them as outside the model as the “science” does not support the findings. It is all anecdotal, blah, blah, blah. (or Ga, Ga, Ga? Naw, naw, naw that was too easy.)

I concede to marketing people that there is science behind human behavior, many times it is predictable and you can use this knowledge to shape and guide many people into buying stuff they don’t need. There is also a science behind SEO and you can craft it to maximize results. But that is not the entire game. Part of marketing should be in awe of these random human connections that can be explained but not predicted or controlled. But really good marketing people won’t dismiss what is happening just because it doesn’t fit the model; they’ll run with it and figure it out later.

Where is this all going and how can you use this to bring more people to your blog or buy your widget? Hell if I know! I’m just content to roll down the window, stick my head out and enjoy the feeling of the wind through my ears.

Perhaps that is the lesson; not everything is science and the most fun parts of life are the art-filled magic of random connections we all make to other human beings without having to feel like we need to quantify them on a chart or explain them as relevant.

*This blog post was written while listening to Lady GaGa at ear-shattering decibels. No eardrums were permanently harmed during the actual writing and the tune in my head has been now replaced with a more age-appropriate Dame Shirley Bassey soundtrack.

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I had a wild, random thought as I was walking Charlie and Sallie this afternoon. What if I ran a sentence in English through Google Language and got another sentence in another language. Then, I ran that result back again and had it translate back into English. Would the result be the exact same?

So, here it is:
  The quick red fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog.
Translated into French:
  Le renard rouge rapide sauté par-dessus le chien paresseux sommeil.
Translated back into English
  The quick red fox jumped over the lazy dog sleep.

Hmmm.. a dog named sleep? The translation is kinda close, close enough that our human brains can make the correction on the fly. But what if we then translated the result again, then again, then again until perhaps the meaning was entirely lost and all we were left with was a jumble of words that were all correctly translated, but had no meaning in context with each other?

As it turns out, Google Language probably anticipated this at some time and a translation gives you the original, but the first translation was just a bit “off,” off enough to start a chain reaction of misunderstandings and unanticipated translations.

Yet we do this all the time when we fail to read a story behind a headline, when we retweet a tweet without reading the linked article first, when we allow machines to sort through resumés and give us the top ten qualified candidates, when we qualify someone for a loan based on a compiled score instead of their character and when we formulate an opinion about someone, relying on gossip that someone said about someone who said something about someone.

Do your own homework. Source your own material. Formulate your own thoughts. Listen for yourself.

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I listened to Rand Paul on NPR and Rachel Maddow yesterday and I think I understand what he is saying. He needs to come up with the 140 character sound byte or he will quickly spin this out of control. The link above is his interview with Maddow. (MSNBC embed is a pain)

Here is what I think he is saying:

People should act with decency, respect for others and common sense. When you fail at that, government then feels they get to decide for you. Once you give government the power to decide for you, they take and take and take, all in the name of “protecting” your rights. So, people, don’t be dumbasses and get yourself stuck in a corner so that the only solution is to have government sort you all out, ok?

That is what I think he is saying. But the folks interviewing him are too busy searching out for that sound byte that they aren’t really listening to his answers.

Argue.

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For a whole hour today, we were wild dogs, romping in the woods without obligation or responsibility. Then we got tired and wished for a comfy couch.

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We stopped at the JD Custard in Englewood, next to the Oinkadoodlemoo BBQ and they had a sign in the window for some Dogwiches, .39 each or 4.50 for a barkers dozen (clever, right?)

They are two dog biscuits sandwiched with vanilla custard. Me and Sallie could not wait to gobble them up.

Love this kind of thing!

BTW, JD Custard and Oinkadoodlemoo will both be at the adidas Warrior Soccer Classic on Memorial Day weekend at Thomas Cloud Park in Dayton, Ohio, so if you know anyone who is playing in the tournament or you just want to watch some really great youth soccer, stop on by and tell them you saw them at DogWalkBlog.com!

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